I was in the locker room with four other masters runners. One of our group made notice of another’s arm warmers. They’re so light and sheer, said the first, unlike any he’d ever seen before. Who makes them? The owner giggled sheepishly, looked around, and confessed: they’re his wife’s pantyhose. All of us were married with children, and thus, no stranger to oddball displays of ingenuity. There were high-fives all around.

Ask my five-year-old daughter what she had for dinner during our stay and she will answer with resigned acceptance, beans. And what did you have for breakfast? More beans (sigh). She will only say the word out of the corner of her mouth, as if articulating it properly would give someone the opportunity to stuff more beans in.

I studied the shot of clear liquor in front of me. It had a sharp fragrance that I couldn’t place, and no one at the table knew the English word for it. Our hostess made the first toast, and I downed 2 ounces of what turned out to be horseradish schnapps. Looking at the bottom of my shot glass I thought, it can’t possibly get any more Ukrainian than this.

There was something off about the style of the leather jackets the two men were wearing. At first I thought they were holdovers from the 1980’s, but that wasn’t quite right. They looked more like a reverse engineering effort where someone had described the 1980s to a designer who hadn’t lived through them, and those jackets were the result.

As much as we might want to, there are some patches of real estate on the planet we are simply not going to be able to visit. As a second-best alternative, our family hosts international visitors to Chicago several times a year.

American soft power, that ability to achieve diplomatic objectives without threat or coercion, stems from many sources: aid packages, student exchanges, Katy Perry songs. I would like to make the case that the US State Department should add pancakes to the list.

…I wanted to let Susan know she didn’t need to spend any time on the basics, so I name-dropped my subscription to Cook’s Illustrated, an intense, no-frills cooking magazine that uses the phrase “molecular structure” at least once per issue. She got it, and volleyed back, mentioning the name of the magazine’s editor. Having finished taking measure of one another, we began the tour…

…I hated taking the kids out for a break – I had to assume that any real estate beyond the moat of garbage had already served as someone else’s receptacle. Exacerbating the problem was that our two younger children did not yet have a healthy fear of infectious disease – they still wanted to touch anything and everything. Trying to get at the problem from the other end, I became reluctant to let the kids eat or drink…

Mile 22 of the Indianapolis Marathon was not where I expected to have my first extra-marital tryst. Looking back though, I should have seen it coming – dangerous, illicit love was in the air. And as is probably often the case, it started with the Megabus ride from Chicago to Indianapolis.